A Sikh man prays during a vigil last month at the Sikh Religious Society of Wisconsin.

The tragic shootings in Oak Creek have spurred heartfelt dialogue about how to address what happened and, better yet, how to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future. Lost in this dialogue is mention that Wisconsin does not officially track hate crimes endured by its Sikh citizens.

While local police must track hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, Catholics and even Protestants, Sikhs are missing from the state's official Hate Crime Incident Report. What's left on the form are "Anti-Other Religion" or "Anti-Multi-Religious Group" categories to characterize hate crimes against Sikhs. It is easy though to question the usefulness of these categories. How does one protect against the menace of people who are "anti-other religion"?

This exclusion means that state and local law enforcement have no real way of understanding the threat that Sikhs in their midst face from hate violence. It also means that the six Sikhs killed and two Sikhs hospitalized during the Oak Creek massacre will not even have their Sikh identity acknowledged by the state in its official compilation of hate crime incidents. This is not helpful to law enforcement, nor is it fair to the victims.

In this country, Sikhs have a long history of suffering bias. My father would be told to "go back to Iran" during the Iran hostage crisis. I received crank calls at my dorm room telling me to "go back to Iraq" during the first Persian Gulf War. After Oklahoma City, a law school classmate told me "my people" would be targeted (before Timothy McVeigh was identified and caught).

After Sept. 11, the onslaught of bias and hate violence against Sikhs and other Americans was well-documented. The first hate crime murder after Sept. 11 was of a Sikh, Balbir Singh Sodhi, in Mesa, Ariz. In the days and months that followed, a Sikh woman in San Diego was stabbed, a gurdwara (Sikh house of worship) in Cleveland was firebombed, an elderly man in New York City who went to pray for the victims was beaten and hospitalized afterward.

Sept. 11 was not a blip on the radar screen. As Wisconsin painfully learned, Sikhs remain targets of bigots to this day. In just over a year, a gurdwara in Sterling Heights, Mich., was the subject of hate-motivated vandalism; a Sikh family in Sterling, Va., received hate-motivated death threats in the mail; a Sikh transit worker was beaten in New York; and a Sikh cab driver was beaten brutally in West Sacramento, Calif. It is clear that the threat against Sikhs is real and ever-present. Nevertheless, Wisconsin law enforcement officers lack a category to meaningfully measure and track hate crimes against this religious group.

To be fair, Wisconsin is not completely to blame for this gap. The state incident report form largely mirrors the categories in the federal government's Hate Crime Incident Report form which also lacks an "Anti-Sikh" checkbox. Last week, 19 members of the U.S. Senate wrote to the attorney general asking him to fix this error. Their letter followed a similar effort this past spring by 93 members of the House of Representatives. It remains to be seen whether the federal government will heed their call.

But Wisconsin does not need to wait for the federal government to get its act together. Wisconsin can and should lead the way now by creating a category that tracks hate crimes against Sikhs specifically. After what happened in Oak Creek, the victims deserve the dignity of being more than an "other" statistic. By understanding who specifically is vulnerable to hate violence, Wisconsin's law enforcement efforts and the safety of its citizens will be enhanced.

Amardeep Singh is the Co-Founder and Director of Programs at the Sikh Coalition in New York, the nation's largest Sikh civil rights organization.